At the age of twenty-six Donald Trump had sealed his first multi-million-dollar deal. It was a sweet thing for a young man who had been his father’s full-time student ever since graduation from Wharton. Every morning he and his father drove from Jamaica Estates to Fred Trump’s modest office in Beach Haven, one of the large housing developments the older man had built near Coney Island in the early 1950s. Inside a nondescript, three-story brick building on Avenue Z, the headquarters of the Trump family empire still looked like the dentist’s office it had once been, with a linoleum floor, shag carpet, and chest-high partitions between cubicles.

This is the last of three profiles of the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller,​The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Nearly two decades after Friedrich Trump came to America and a year before his first son, Fred, was born, another boy landed at New York Harbor. He was fifteen, a year younger than Friedrich had been upon his arrival. Like Friedrich, he had traveled alone and left behind his family, his homeland, and his obligation to enter into his country’s military service. And he, too, did not intend to return. His name was Abraham Eli Kazan, and the country he left was Russia. In the coming decades, he, like Fred Trump, would become a real estate developer in New York, building apartments in a city with a desperate need for housing. In the late 1950s the two men each sought to build on the same stretch of Coney Island, a long and bitter struggle that eventually entangled the highest levels of city government. But it was more than a battle between two well-connected businessmen. Trump and Kazan were leaders in two separate movements battling for effective control of the way the city would grow — and because New York City was a bellwether for the rest of the nation, the way that cities all over the country would grow. Ultimately, on this patch of Coney Island, not far from the famous amusement rides, Fred Trump helped carve America's urban future.

This is the second of three posts on the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller,​The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Back home, in Kallstadt, Germany, a young Friedrich Trump had listened to stories of those who had left for America and made it, determining to do likewise. Arriving in New York City in October 1885 at the age of sixteen, he listened to sagas of the West and picked up what he would need to head that way. In Seattle, he listened to descriptions of Monte Cristo and set himself up in the small Washington mining town. Now, at twenty-eight, he listened to the tales miners were telling one another about gold strikes in Alaska and, especially, in the Yukon.

This is the first of three posts on the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller,​The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s was home to a squatting movement unlike any other in the United States. Drawing on their diverse radical and progressive roots, squatters claimed and occupied city-owned abandoned building with a winning combination: a Yippie sense of drama and fun, punk rock aggression and subcultural grit, and urban homesteaders’ earnest appeals to American values of self-sufficiency and initiative. When faced with eviction they learned how to build barricades and booby traps and drum up riots from their European counterparts, and each attempt to evict Lower East Side squatters from the late ‘80s on brought newly escalated police and squatter tactics. By the mid-1990s, the police were using tanks and helicopters and the squatters were burning cars in the streets.

In November 2015, a federal court sentenced New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to twelve years in prison on corruption charges. The most serious charge hinted at the close connections between Silver, a Lower East Side assemblyman for nearly three decades, and luxury real estate. According to court records, Silver persuaded two real estate developers, Glenwood Management and the Witkoff Group, to have one of his associates file assessments with the city to reduce the companies’ property taxes.[1] The prosecution also alleged that Silver worked with lobbyists to provide over one billion in tax breaks to Glenwood and prevented a drug treatment center from opening near one of the company’s residential buildings. In return, the associate siphoned off a portion of his legal fees to Silver and continued to assess more Glenwood buildings, an arrangement that netted the assemblyman roughly $700,000. In sum, prosecutors noted, “[Silver] postured himself as Mr. Tenant,” but remained “on a secret retainer to the landlords, to the wealthiest developer of real estate in New York City.”[2]

Where do you live? What’s your place like? New Yorkers love talking about real estate. In a city where land is at a premium, recent articles about tiny houses, shared housing, poor doors, public housing, and the social consequences of housing all point to the everyday ramifications and moral valences of housing in New York and elsewhere. To talk about housing –- in New York City especially -– is to have a conversation about religion, not only as a site of ultimate meaning, but of ritual practice and identity formation. This intensity about where and how to live is not new to our generation of New Yorkers, however. One largely forgotten form of housing offered a popular –- if controversial –- solution for New Yorkers throughout the nineteenth century: the boardinghouse.

​The spring of 1904... was pivotal for African Americans then living in Harlem. Their unremarkable co-existence with white residents of Harlem was about to come to an end. As in other northern cities, in New York City what it meant to be black was changing. The increased presence of African Americans in northern cities was accompanied in most cases by growing hostility from white residents, and the hostility often resulted in policies attempting to add restrictions to the residential movement of blacks, replacing what had been more fluid, informal practices. In Harlem, the range of white responses to the Black presence demonstrated a diversity of views among white residents, as well as the importance of real estate ownership to African American community formation and permanence.

By Richard Howe By the end of the 19th century most of the streets and avenues laid out on the island of Manhattan by the 1811 Commissioners Plan and its 1870 northern extension by the Central Park Commissioners had been opened to traffic and as much as two-thirds or more of them had been paved. The island’s rural estates had been broken up and sold after having been subdivided into building lots conforming to the blocks in the street plan. Most of the island up to about 168th Street had been densely built up, with nearly 100,000 buildings —- over 80,000 of them residential -— carpeting the built-up area. At least 90% of all the buildings on the island -— and 99% of the residential buildings -— were no more than six stories tall; the average height was about five stories: 60 feet at a nominal 12 feet per story. And at least 75% of the buildings were 20–25 feet wide and 60–80 feet deep. But why? Why so many buildings, and why so many in just this range of sizes?

By Richard Howe The extraordinarily rapid growth of New York in its “long” 19th century, 1790–1910, rarely fails to astonish, and this is true not only of its 100-fold population increase -— 70-fold in the old city, i.e., in Manhattan -— but also of the increase in its numbers of buildings: a 20-fold increase in Manhattan alone.